The Unnamed Partner

The United States and Ukraine signed an agreement on April 30, 2025 establishing the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed for the United States. Ukraine's First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko signed for Ukraine. The fund would receive fifty percent of royalties and licensing fees from new natural resource projects in Ukraine — titanium, lithium, graphite, oil, and gas — and in exchange, the United States committed to long-term financial, reconstruction, and military support.

The public framing was equal partnership. Two sovereign parties, shared stakes, mutual benefit, Ukraine's future funded by its own ground.

The Limited Partnership agreement, drafted by Freshfields LLP under DFC sponsorship and reviewed by the Kyiv Post, identifies the general partner of the fund as follows:

That is a bracket. Not a name. A placeholder. As of May 2026, the identity of the entity that operationally controls the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund has not been made public. No outlet has named it. The two supplemental agreements signed May 13, 2025 — the day after Zelensky put his signature on the fund — are classified. Their contents have not been disclosed. The name inside the bracket has not been released.

Old Goat intends to explain why that bracket matters, who moved money the day it was filled in, and why the document it sits inside is not a one-time instrument.

The Structure That Benefits Whoever Manages It

The Kyiv Post analysis of the LP agreement was unambiguous: "whoever manages it benefits." The phrase deserves to be read against the actual structure of the arrangement, because the gap between what was announced and what was agreed is wide enough to lose a country in.

The board: three votes for the United States, two for Ukraine, all decisions by simple majority. The United States wins every vote. The DFC holds a Class C Unit — a golden share — giving it the right to block any decision the fund makes. Ukraine does not have this right. Ukraine has no right to withdraw from the fund, demand the return of its contribution, or transfer its interest to another participant. The DFC can do any of these things. The unnamed Delaware LLC general partner has full operational control.

Ukraine has full liability. Without the protection tools that full liability normally comes with.

Freshfields LLP drafted this. They are a transactional law firm — private equity, sovereign wealth, cross-border deals. They are not a development finance specialist. The engagement was sponsored by the DFC. The partners who drafted the golden share provision and the clause removing Ukraine's exit rights know the name inside the bracket. That name is in Freshfields' internal engagement records. It has not been reported.

The Day Zelensky Signed

The agreement's timeline moved quickly after the confrontation in the Oval Office. Trump had initially demanded $500 billion in rare earth compensation for prior US aid. Zelensky rejected it. Diplomatic relations deteriorated, then thawed after a meeting at the Vatican. The finalized deal, substantially modified from Trump's original demands, was signed April 30. The Rada ratified it 338 to 0 on May 8. Zelensky signed it into Ukrainian law on May 12. The fund entered into force May 23.

May 12, 2025. The date the fund became law. Old Goat ran the SEC Form 4 and FEC databases against that date.

What follows is documented fact, sourced to public filings, not inference.

Larry Ellison sold $4,740,000 in Oracle shares on May 12, 2025. On the same day, he donated $500,000 to MAGA Inc. That is a same-day trade-and-donation pairing. Oracle is the primary vendor for US government AI and cloud infrastructure. Whether any component of Oracle's federal infrastructure stack touches the operational architecture of the URIF has not been reported. What is documented is that Ellison sold $4.74 million in Oracle stock and wrote a $500,000 check to a Trump committee on the day Zelensky signed the fund. View Dashboard →^¹

Stephen Schwarzman sold $2,640,000 in Blackstone shares on May 12, 2025. On the same day, he donated $2,500,000 to the Trump 47 Committee. Schwarzman's Blackstone has documented Ukraine reconstruction interest — the firm was part of the 2024 advisory consortium examining post-war Ukrainian infrastructure investment. The sale and the donation are both confirmed in public databases. They occurred on the same day. The fund they occurred alongside was signed into law the same day.

Safra Catz sold $13,905,000 in Oracle shares on May 12, 2025. On the same day, she donated $250,000 to Save America PAC. Catz and Ellison are both Oracle executives — the two of them sold $18.6 million in Oracle stock on the same day, the same day Zelensky signed the Ukraine mineral fund, the same day both of them made Trump donations.

Alexander Karp, the CEO of Palantir, donated $100,000 to Pine Tree Results PAC on May 12. Karp does not appear in the trade cluster — no Form 4 filing for that date is in the dataset. Palantir is the primary provider of battlefield AI systems to the Ukrainian military, operating under US government contracts. His presence in the May 12 donation cluster without a visible stock trade is itself a signal worth noting.

Three Oracle and Blackstone principals executed simultaneous stock sales and Trump donations on the day the Ukraine mineral fund became law. A fourth principal with documented Ukraine battlefield AI contracts donated without appearing in the trade record. A fifth — Musk — bought $41.8 million in Tesla while everyone around him was selling.

The Musk position deserves a specific observation. SpaceX's Starlink terminal network has been operationally deployed in Ukraine since the early war period. Musk publicly considered cutting Starlink service in 2022 and was pressured not to. The continued operation of Starlink in Ukraine is a US policy decision. Whether the URIF's entry into force creates any policy certainty around Starlink's future operational status in Ukraine — and whether Musk had any reason to believe it did — is not answerable from public data. What is documented is that he bought while the others sold, on the day of the signing, and that SpaceX has more at stake in Ukraine's technology infrastructure than any of the companies represented in the simultaneous sell cluster.

The Day After — What Was Signed and What Was Not Disclosed

On May 13, 2025 — the day after Zelensky signed — the United States and Ukraine signed two supplemental agreements. Both are classified. Neither has been made public. Their contents have not been disclosed to the press or the public as of May 2026.

The intergovernmental treaty itself — TIAS 25-523, available on the State Department website — identifies the two limited partners: DFC and Ukraine's Agency on Support Public-Private Partnership. It does not name the Delaware LLC general partner. The treaty went through the official TIAS process. The supplemental agreements, signed the following day, did not. They were signed into an information vacuum that the market activity of May 12 preceded by twenty-four hours.

In the context of a fund with an unnamed general partner and an LP agreement that grants Ukraine no exit rights, the supplementals are the most consequential documents in the entire arrangement. They could define who the GP is. They could specify which mineral extraction rights are transferred and at what scope. They could set the fee arrangements between the named fund advisor and the unnamed GP. They could lock in operational specifics that the public LP agreement left in brackets.

The money moved on May 12. The classified documents were signed on May 13. The market activity and the information asymmetry are adjacent — the trades occurring inside the window between the public signing event and the classified supplemental agreements whose contents have not been released.

Old Goat is not asserting that the executives who traded on May 12 knew what was in the supplemental agreements. That claim would require evidence that does not exist in public data. What Old Goat is asserting is that the pattern — sell-and-donate on the day the fund becomes law, classified documents signed the next day, GP identity still unknown a year later — is the pattern this program was built to identify. The trades are documented. The donations are documented. The timing is documented. The blank is documented.

The Unusual Advisor — And Now Her Name Is Known

In November 2025, the URIF board announced that Alvarez & Marsal had been named fund advisor. This dispatch initially flagged the appointment as structurally unusual — A&M is a restructuring and turnaround firm, the firm that handled the Lehman Brothers wind-down, not a sovereign development finance advisor. The appointment required an explanation that went beyond institutional expertise.

The explanation is now on the record.

The named A&M principal on the URIF advisory mandate is Elizabeth Shortino, Managing Director, Public Sector Services. Her background: more than ten years at the United States Department of the Treasury in leadership roles covering Middle East, North Africa, and international monetary policy. United States Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund, where she represented the United States on the IMF Executive Board. The Office of Management and Budget, overseeing US appropriations for economic assistance programs at State and USAID. The US State Department, running economic assistance programs.

That is the answer to the question. A&M did not get the URIF advisory mandate because Alvarez & Marsal has deep reconstruction finance expertise. They got it because Elizabeth Shortino spent a career inside the institutions that built the architecture of international development finance, and she joined A&M and brought that network with her. The appointment follows the person, not the firm. The person is the former US Executive Director at the IMF who now works at a restructuring shop that has just been handed an advisory role in the largest US sovereign reconstruction fund since the Marshall Plan.

Whether A&M's appointment as advisor is designed to position them for distressed asset acquisitions as Ukraine's post-war restructuring proceeds — nationalized industries, state enterprises, infrastructure at book-down valuations — or whether it is purely an advisory role, is not answerable from the announcement language alone. What is answerable is who brought the relationship. Her name is Elizabeth Shortino. Her prior employer was the United States government. Orbit →^²

The Same Minerals, The Same Administration, The Same Period

The mineral list in the URIF agreement includes dysprosium, terbium, samarium, and gadolinium. These are heavy rare earth elements — defense-grade, strategic, irreplaceable in advanced weapons systems, electric motors, and high-performance electronics. China controls approximately 85 percent of global rare earth processing capacity. The United States has been working to break that dependency for a decade.

Those four minerals — dysprosium, terbium, samarium, gadolinium — are the same four minerals named in the Tanbreez offtake agreement between REalloys and Critical Metals Corp. The Greenland rare earth deal documented in The Forever Clause, a previous dispatch in this series.

Same minerals. Different geography. Same administration. Same period.

The Greenland architecture is built around a Danish autonomous territory that the United States has publicly stated it intends to acquire by purchase, political pressure, or other means. The Ukraine architecture is built around a sovereign nation destroyed by war that the United States has offered to defend in exchange for preferential mineral access. The legal instruments are different. The mineral mandate is the same. The effect — exclusive US control over critical rare earth deposits outside the Chinese supply chain — is identical. Dashboard →^⁶

This is not coincidence. It is policy, built systematically, through bilateral instruments with territories under different forms of stress. The fund structures do not need to look alike. They only need to produce the same result. The Greenland deal and the Ukraine deal are parallel architectures, constructed by the same administration in the same year, targeting the same materials, through mechanisms that in both cases leave the critical decisions in the hands of entities whose names are either not public or not yet publicly challenged.

The Template — And What Fortinbras Stands To Control

The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act — Public Law 119-60, signed December 18, 2025 — included a DFC reauthorization in Division H, Title LXXXVII. The reauthorization runs through December 31, 2031. The contingent liability ceiling was raised from sixty billion dollars to two hundred and five billion dollars. A five billion dollar equity revolving fund was authorized at Treasury. And the act included authority for DFC to replicate the bilateral US-Ukraine investment fund structure with other partner nations.

Congo is not named in the statute. Congo does not need to be named in the statute. DFC has already moved. Letters of Interest have been issued for a proposed equity investment in a joint venture involving Gécamines SA — the Democratic Republic of Congo's state mining company — and Mercuria Energy Trading, targeting copper, cobalt, and critical minerals. That is not CSIS commentary. That is a DFC operational action, taken under the authority the NDAA just expanded to $205 billion in contingent liability.

That is the closing argument of this dispatch, and it is more important than any individual trade or donation in the dataset.

The unnamed Delaware LLC general partner is not a one-time instrument. The LP agreement with the bracket placeholder is not a unique document. The classified supplemental agreements whose contents were never disclosed are not a singular event. The NDAA provision means that the legal architecture of the URIF — golden share, no exit rights for the partner nation, unnamed controlling entity, classified operational agreements — is now the authorized template for every future resource deal the United States makes with a distressed partner nation, backed by $205 billion in authorized exposure.

Ben Black and Conor Coleman — the two named DFC officials who chair and sit on the URIF board — both came from the same place before DFC. Fortinbras Enterprises LP. A small private investment firm. Two founding members of Fortinbras Enterprises now hold the two control positions at the agency that manages the bracket. The name Fortinbras is from Shakespeare's Hamlet — the prince who does nothing during the play's action and inherits everything when it ends.

Ukraine was the pilot. The template is the story underneath the story.

The Research That Remains

The dispatch publishes with these threads open. They are open because public databases have limits, not because the questions do not have answers.

The Delaware Secretary of State entity database is public. Any LLC registered under a name containing "United States Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund" or "URIF" would appear in a search. Common DFC registered agents — Corporation Service Company and CT Corporation — file for DFC-adjacent vehicles routinely. If the URIF GP was registered through a Freshfields affiliate agent, that narrows the field to one firm and one set of partners. That search is running.

Freshfields publishes its US partner roster. Their Washington and New York offices run public finance, government, and infrastructure practices. Those names cross-referenced against FEC contribution records for the April 25 through May 23 window — the LP drafting period — would answer whether any Freshfields partner donated to a Trump-aligned committee while they were writing the document that handed Ukraine no exit rights. If yes, that is the law-firm parallel to the CFTC revolving door documented in The Casino.

Alvarez & Marsal publishes its managing directors. A prior employment check against DFC, Treasury, and State Department would identify the relationship that produced the URIF advisory mandate. Ben Black and Conor Coleman, the two named DFC officials on the URIF board, have professional histories that are not hidden. If either worked at A&M before DFC, the appointment follows the relationship. If an A&M managing director worked at DFC or Treasury before A&M, the same logic applies in reverse.

Those answers exist. This dispatch will report them when they are confirmed.

The Question That Cuts Through

A fund was created. It controls access to Ukraine's mineral future — the dysprosium, the terbium, the graphite, the oil beneath a country still at war. The fund's LP agreement gives the United States three board votes to Ukraine's two, a golden share that blocks any decision Ukraine might attempt, and no exit mechanism for the partner that contributed its sovereign resources. The fund's general partner has no public name. The operational agreements are classified. The law firm that wrote the structure has not been examined. The advisor appointed to run the fund is a restructuring firm whose prior relationship to the controlling officials has not been reported.

On the day the fund became Ukrainian law, three of the most prominent executives in the Trump orbit sold stock and wrote checks to Trump committees. A fourth donated without appearing in the trade record. A fifth — the one with the most direct operational stake in Ukraine's digital infrastructure — bought $41.8 million in his own company's stock while everyone around him sold.

The bracket in the LP agreement is still empty on the public record.

[GP/LLC], a Delaware limited liability company.

That is the filing. That is the placeholder. That is where this investigation runs.

Whoever fills the bracket owns the receipts.

The noise is the point. The scaffolding is the story.

More to follow.

— OldGoat InTheHood

May 2026

Sources and Notes

URIF LP agreement draft: reviewed by Kyiv Post, March 2025. General partner placeholder confirmed in published Kyiv Post analysis. "Whoever manages it benefits" — direct quote from Kyiv Post analysis. Signing dates and signatories confirmed by US Treasury Department and Ukrainian government statements.

Board structure (3 US / 2 Ukraine votes, DFC golden share, Ukraine no exit rights): sourced to LP agreement draft as reviewed by Kyiv Post. Freshfields LLP drafting: confirmed in Kyiv Post reporting. DFC sponsorship of engagement confirmed.

Trade data: SEC Form 4 filings, May 12, 2025. Ellison ORCL sale $4,740,000; Catz ORCL sale $13,905,000; Schwarzman BX sale $2,640,000; Dimon JPM sale $6,069,000; Musk TSLA purchase $41,807,500. All from dashboard SEC Form 4 dataset sourced from EDGAR. Suspects Dashboard →^¹

Donation data: FEC OpenData, confirmed in dashboard FEC dataset. Ellison $500,000 to MAGA Inc, May 12, 2025. Schwarzman $2,500,000 to Trump 47 Committee, May 12, 2025. Catz $250,000 to Save America PAC, May 12, 2025. Karp $100,000 to Pine Tree Results PAC, May 12, 2025. All May 12 donations confirmed by cross-reference of FEC and SEC filing dates. Donors Dashboard →^⁴

Schwarzman 2024 Ukraine reconstruction advisory role: Blackstone's participation in post-war Ukraine infrastructure advisory consortium, 2024. Documented in public press reporting at time of announcement.

Supplemental agreements: signed May 13, 2025. Both classified per CSIS analysis and confirmed absence of public disclosure as of May 2026.

URIF board meetings and capitalization: DFC press releases, September 2025. Ben Black (DFC CEO) and Conor Coleman (DFC Head of Investments) named in public statements. DFC $75M equity seed September 18, 2025.

Alvarez & Marsal appointment: November 14, 2025. Confirmed by DFC press release ("DFC-Led US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Appoints Key Operational Partner") and Reuters/US News reporting. Named A&M principal: Elizabeth Shortino, Managing Director, Public Sector Services. Career confirmed via A&M public bio: US Treasury (10+ years, Middle East/North Africa/international monetary policy leadership), US Executive Director at IMF, OMB, State Department. Appointment relationship attributed to Shortino's government network, not prior employment connection between Black/Coleman and A&M (none found). A&M description as restructuring/turnaround firm: per A&M public corporate profile and Lehman Brothers engagement history.

Ben Black (DFC CEO) and Conor Coleman (DFC Head of Investments) prior employment: both confirmed from Fortinbras Enterprises LP, a private investment firm. Black: Founder and Managing Partner, Fortinbras; prior Apollo Global Management, Knowledge Universe Holdings, Goldman Sachs, Sullivan & Cromwell. Coleman: founding investment team, Fortinbras; prior Jefferies (Debt Advisory & Restructuring), Beach Point Capital. Senate confirmation of Black: October 7, 2025. No prior Alvarez & Marsal connection for either confirmed.

Mineral list overlap: URIF agreement text includes dysprosium, terbium, samarium, gadolinium. Tanbreez/REalloys offtake agreement mineral list confirmed in The Forever Clause dispatch, this series. Full rare earth overlap confirmed.

NDAA: FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 119-60, signed December 18, 2025. DFC reauthorization: Division H, Title LXXXVII ("DFC Modernization and Reauthorization Act of 2025"). Reauthorization through December 31, 2031. Contingent liability ceiling raised from $60 billion to $205 billion. $5 billion equity revolving fund authorized at Treasury. Bilateral investment fund replication authority: confirmed by DFC press release ("DFC Secures Expanded Authorities with FY26 NDAA Signed into Law") and CSIS analysis. Congo not named in statute; referenced in CSIS and Center for Global Development commentary. DRC/Gécamines/Mercuria: DFC Letters of Interest for equity investment in Gécamines SA/Mercuria Energy Trading joint venture confirmed in DFC press release ("DFC Strengthens Strategic Partnerships with Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda").

Karp/Palantir Ukraine contracts: Palantir's battlefield AI systems operational in Ukraine under US government contracts — confirmed in public Palantir investor communications and Ukrainian government statements. Palantir disclosed no URIF-specific contracts as of date of publication.

Musk/Starlink: SpaceX Starlink Ukraine deployment confirmed. 2022 service disruption controversy and subsequent continuation confirmed in public reporting (SpaceX statements, Pentagon communications, Ukrainian military statements). Policy linkage between Starlink operation and URIF entry into force is context, not confirmed causation.

All trade and donation figures from InsiderTrumpTrades dashboard dataset, sourced from SEC EDGAR and FEC OpenData. Dashboard updated as of May 2026.